Messing About With Words

Around ten months ago, weary from letting my stories languish half finished on computer drives, I decided to join a critique group to see if mutual support from other aspiring authors could help me get through what I like to term the “Twenty Page Blues”. This is the point at which I usually have a crisis of confidence and give up. It’s been this way ever since I could remember, for as long as I’ve been telling stories, I have also been giving up on them, and my mother was sick of finding half finished first chapters. So much so, that when I said I was starting a novel, my family gave a collective shrug of their shoulders and waited for me to lose hope.

Ten months on: I have a completed novel, twenty thousand words of short fiction, ten thousand words of formal poetry, and have given my first blog interview on writing.

Joining an online writers group was a good move, because the encouragement from my critique group pushed me through the Twenty Page Blues. Studying the craft of writing, editing and critiquing others, has also given me a much clearer understanding of what works — and what doesn’t — in commercial fiction.

And so my goals for 2015 are set. It’s going to be a fabulous year. I hope it will be for you too.

To paraphrase Mr Rat from Wind and the Willows, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so worth doing as messing — simply messing — about with words. Happy New Year!